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Tom Thomson: Man of mystery, many talents

Journalist and author Roy MacGregor speaks at a panel discussion about mythic Canadian painter Tom Thomson in Owen Sound Saturday. Seated left to right are: David Huff, collections curator at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound; Angie Littlefield and David Silcox, who are art experts and authors of Thomson books; Thomson enthusiast Tim Bouma who tweets and blogs about the artist; and Detroit lawyer and Thomson author Neil Lehto. (Scott Dunn/The Sun Times)

He was a fisherman, a baker and a lover of nature. And as a brilliant painter and experimenter, he inspired the Group of Seven, whose paintings, along with his, have helped define Canada.

The iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson was described in those ways and others at a panel discussion of experts and keen observers Saturday, one century after his death and 140 years to the day after his birth.

Dozens of visitors sat in the pews inside the former Knox United Church, now the Harmony Centre, in downtown Owen Sound. This was the Thomson family's church after Thomson's parents sold their Leith farmhouse and moved to town. The discussion was a feast for anyone hungry for anything about Thomson.

There were six on the panel, each of whom contributed something different to the discussion about Thomson, who was born in Claremont, near Pickering but grew up in Leith and died at 39 under mysterious circumstances at Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park on July 8, 1917.

“Someone said Tom's spirit is thick in the country,” said Tim Bouma, who tweets and blogs as Thomson at www.twitter.com/TTLastSpring and TTLastSpring.com.

His posts weave known day-to-day events in Thomson's life with current events of the time and Thomson's own observations as imagined by Bouma, who also was raised in Leith.

“There is a myth in the making here. There is something that's larger than all of us and I think that's one of the things that I'm looking for, that Canadians are looking for. They're looking for stories that are larger than them.”

Though in Europe and the United States there are still lots of people who don't know about Thomson, interest is growing in him, said David Huff, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery's curator of collections here in Owen Sound. “We find that every year there's just more and more people coming from further afield to see and explore his artwork.”

Angie Littlefield has written art history and three books on Tom Thomson including the recent “Thomson's Fine Kettle of Friends: biography, history, art and food.”

She wondered why aren't there lots of Tom Thomson biographies? “Canadians do not pay enough attention to their heros.”

She also noted one thing never talked about is the influence of one of Thomson's best friend, John Beatty, had on teachers in the province.

“I believe that Tom Thomson's legacy is as strong as it is today because Beatty ran the summer school for people who wanted to be teachers in Ontario and pretty much anyone who went through John Beatty to be a teacher would have been exposed to Tom Thomson.”

Roy MacGregor got interested in the Thomson story though his family's connections to the Thomson family.

He's a multiple award-winning journalist with the Globe and Mail and has authored 50 books, including the novel “Canoe Lake”, as well as the non-fiction examination of Thomson's life and death in “The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman who Loved Him”.

“There are very few facts. And there are probably an equal number of 'alternative facts,'” and the rest is speculation, said MacGregor.

He quoted Thomson's great grand-niece, Tracy Thomson, saying “'The death and the mystery are forever entwined.' And maybe we should never really know what happened. Because as she put it, 'Let the chatter never end.'”

Neil Lehto, a lawyer who lives in suburban Detroit who wrote “Algonquin Elegy: Tom Thomson's Last Spring,” concurred with that. When he looks at the stories after Thomson's death, it can be hard to pick out the facts.

For example, going back to old train schedules he's left questioning one story of how Tom's brother George could have travelled back and forth from Owen Sound to Canoe Lake twice in the time available, once during the search for him and again to fetch his remains.

The story goes that Thomson's body wasn't found for eight days, it was hastily examined by a vacationing doctor and buried the next day. It was exhumed the day after that, sealed in a steel casket and reburied on July 21, 1917 in the Leith family plot.

MacGregor suggested Thomson's greatest contribution to the cultural landscape was that “Tom romanticized the Canadian wilderness.” There were prints of Thomson paintings in public schools across the country including in his school, which offered a sense that “this was a beautiful country.”

David Silcox wrote with Harold Town “Tom Thomson: the Silence and the Storm”, which is being re- released this fall. He said Thomson was inspired through his experimentation with a new impressionistic painting style which was informed by contemporary Scandinavian art.

His colleagues and friends Lawren Harris and J.E.H.MacDonald, later among those who formed the Group of Seven in 1920, had seen an exhibition of it in Buffalo in 1913 and “They were beside themselves with almost a religious fervour because of what they'd seen,” Silcox said. Thomson was too and he led the way, he said.

The 50th anniversary of Canada was approaching in 1917 and this new painting style was a way to express the country's independent character, Silcox said

Huff, the Thomson gallery curator in Owen Sound, said Thomson's legacy has to be Thomson's art.

“He certainly has taken on a huge part of the Canadian psyche,” he said. “There may be wonderful stories about Thomson's death. There may be wonderful stories about his love life. But if it wasn't for the art, we would not remember who this fellow was.”